Garry Kasparov on How to play the Queen's Gambit

Talking about queen's gambit is often felt as embarking a time machine and traveling to the past because it's all was always considered to be sort of cornerstone of black defense against first D four um in modern times , in , in the middle of the 20th century , in times of uh Fisher , uh it was considered to be very passive and um many people , many players rejected it and chose more aggressive openings while we could always see comebacks , great players and many of their followers returned to the classical heritage and discovered new depths of this great most solid defense .

So let's have a look and let's study the , the general history of this opening which survived all the turmoils and all revolutions in the opening uh mm history of the game of chess for nearly 100 and 50 years .

So after D four D five C four , we are going to look only at second E six and to investigate positions that are related to this uh s uh composition .

Of course , there are many other options for Black in this position , but we're not going to talk about uh uh is accepted , which is also a plausible possibility .

But it's a subject for another survey .

We are also not going to talk about second C six , which leads to a number of options uh classified in general as a slave defense .

Sometimes you could see the move C six being , being inserted in the positions that we are analyzing .

But still , we are making clear distinction between queen gambit .

Queen's gambit and , and Slav defense , which is characterized by blacks chance of taking on uh of C four or somehow playing a six .

The general difference between slab defense and queen queen's gambit is that with slab defense .

Black still hopes to develop the bishop on F five on G four .

While in queen in queen's gambit , uh Black is playing solid , protecting D five square and hoping for uh solving the problem of bishop on C A later on .

So um it was played , as I said for nearly 150 years and we of course smooth with the most natural reply of White Nazis .

And here again , we are not planning to go very deep into the uh another side of , of Gambit uh so called defense where Black is immediately attacking the center .

I in fact agreeing to play a position with an isolated poem .

That's a new type of the positions .

It was highly popular in at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of 20th century .

Uh but it lost most of its popularity after AKI Rubinstein introduced a new system uh with uh with the development development of um bishop uh uh uh light square bishop uh from F one to G two and putting enormous pressure on uh uh black spot on D five .

There were a number of classical games played by Rubinstein that in fact , uh uh demolished , even demolished the um mm beauty of uh tas defense in the eyes of contemporaries .

And for nearly half a century , it was put aside as an insufficient openings .

And eventually Black uh moved to classical defense that was employed by that time uh by such great players and I love him .

Um But the beauty , the beauty and the uh this the what's special about the queen's gambit .

It's the beauty of the opening that he always makes a comeback .

And when you study the history of chess , you could see as in the great players in 10 , 2030 even 50 years are looking again at the classical composition of this opening and finding new ideas .

So to the great surprise of many in uh at the end of sixties , another world champion , another great predecessor of mine Boris Sky employed tariff defense against Tigran Pedros , the king of the position of chess .

And everybody when they looked at this pasque choice was so confused by this stupid quote unquote decision because how could you play against Pedros ?

The positions was isolated .

Po in fact , spay not only survived uh in his uh winning match in 1969 against Petrosian , but even had a positive score , winning one game with number of draws .

Uh because he had an , an ability to look at these positions from a new angle and pose no new problems that Petrosian was not able to resolve .

And then there was another decline in popularity this opening and eventually it was employed by myself in the candidate matches against Evy Korchnoi and Milov .

And it did very successfully by not losing a single game and winning .

In fact , uh three against such a great and powerful opposition .

Uh I remember the effect on Alexander Bela when the first time employed this opening in uh in , in the second game of our match in Moscow in 1983 .

Uh Alexander was shocked because uh from his , you know , general perspective , this opening was wrong .

It did not fit the uh the conventional wisdom of that time .

And he , he spent most of the time in the , in , in , in , in , in the opening trying to find not the reputation but at least in a clear way to get an advantage and he failed and even lost the game which had a serious effect on the entire uh uh match .

Uh And then I also arrogantly employed this opening against Anto Karpov and I had to face not only a great player but an acting world champion who uh was well prepared for this choice and demonstrated new ways of fighting an isolated Poe and eventually it ended up as a total disaster , losing game seven and nine .

Also not because of the opening , but probably due to the nature of the positions that , that fit Karpov's style and didn't allow me to show my tactical abilities .

I dropped this opening , but the story was not over .

And later on , we could see comeback and other comebacks of tariff defense .

And today white has no clear way of , of , of getting a serious advantage uh in , in , in , in , in a classical position , you know , which is which you could see here uh after the castle uh sometimes White is going on DC five .

Bishop takes C five .

Bishop DG five D four and bishop takes F six , followed by 95 28 90 two .

or uh they play more traditional uh playing bishop G five immediately .

And after CD 4 94 6 , bishop is we are seeing another classical , another classical position that was uh uh checked in many , many games .

Why is probably slightly better ?

And you could look at dozens hundreds of games played on recently , but Black has enough defensive resources .

It's not that the game is over .

So uh as we could see , even terror defense , which is um sort of a deviation from the traditions of the Queen's gambit is still holding .

Uh But now we want to look at the most important part of the Queen's gambit uh decline of the classical cornerstones of this , uh , defense that some people call the opening for the world championship matches .